Thank You!

Both fixed.

1- The link to the “the entire worldview of RFK” points to nothing.
2- The link to the fourth example in the following sentence gives an Access denied
error.

From my interviews and surveys (now backed by a lot of science: example, example, example, example), the common factor I see tends to be that crack in the mirror I mentioned earlier.

The theist is the one making the positive claim. “I am saying that this is a thing you should believe in”. The problem of evil dispatches that. It says, “Even you don’t actually have an explanation for how this thing is internally consistent. All I need to do is provide one logically possible better world and your belief is toast”. (At this point, theists suddenly get real specific as to what a “possible world” is when they were real vague back during the ontological argument, which is another sign of delusion: special pleading and equivocation, especially when it’s ad hoc). I’m not at all convinced that even a deductive argument from evil can be answered, but certainly the inductive one is catastrophic, at least for your standard God packages. So just saying “There may be an explanation but I can’t think of one now” is a concession disguised as an argument.

A great irony I find is that this is all a wholly modern problem. The ancients did not believe in a true omni god. It is pretty clear that the early Christians, for example, viewed Satan as actually truly victorious, for the time being . Yes, God will eventually win, but God could not single-handedly change the metaphysics of sin nor instantaneously defeat the devil. Even those who veered close to the idea of a true omni still didn’t imagine it in this logically pretty incoherent way. All one has to do is accept the proposition, “Yes, God has the power to create a universe and do all these things, but he can’t deal with evil by any mechanism”. That at least kicks the can back to, “Okay, prove it then”.

The conclusion is great by the way. Even as an ex-Muslim myself, I still don’t know how to crack the mirror for other Muslims.

For me what started the process was my best friend telling me when we were 16 that he have been experiencing doubts about religion including about the existence of a creator and articulating some of them when we were out playing a table tennis game. I remember that starting that night my brain became obsessed with answering these questions that I have never even contemplated before and I nearly broke out of Islam after about two months but kept myself in through apologetics and evasion of the questions I couldn’t find answers for.

The problem of evil hit me like a train the first time I saw an Arab atheist articulating it on a forum developed and maintained by Arab Islamic apologists to answer non Muslims and especially atheists.

Some immoral teachings and laws also made my life hell:
One of them was slavery but especially war concubines. I remember asking about a famed Egyptian Islamic apologist about how is this not rape? He answered me by saying that it was some form of a lesser marriage with rights which of course doesn’t answer the question but I made myself believe the answer.
Another was that Christians and Jews (and by analogy Muslims extended it to some other religions) in conquered territories by Muslim armies had to choose between converting to Islam, paying an annual fine or be forcibly driven out or killed. This was even worse for the rest of religions whose adherents don’t even have the fine option.

Also I was educated enough to start noticing glaring scientific errors in the Quran and Hadith when I was reading them as a form of worship (something I did almost daily with the Quran) and the apologetics mostly didn’t work.

I also remember especially that biological evolution scared the hell out of me especially
when I learnt about the existence of other Hominins. I evaded it for so long and one of the things that I did before my faith finally broke down was read a book on the subject for the first time in my life after always evading it and seeing it only in the news/online by chance. The book was “Why Evolution is True” by Professor Jerry Coyne.

This process of clinging to Islam took me 11 years until I escaped despite noticing most of these issues in the first couple of years of doubt. Looking back I don’t know why exactly I clung that hard, but probably because it was a huge part of my worldview and sense of identity and also probably because the communities I was in because of it were mostly a net positive influence on my day to day life as I didn’t experience any abuse at all. On the contrary, I mostly experienced people who were good to each other and very charitable (I now realize that the conservatives among them hold dangerously hateful beliefs of course).

Those are good points, Fred.

I think the better way of thinking about it is this:

Delusional behaviors often replicate the cognitive dissonance and “you need to hit rock bottom” elements of addiction, as well as the need for the person to embrace personal responsibility and actually look inwards for their own behavior to change.

And mass delusions in their most degenerate stage also emulate the dynamics of abusive behaviors or cults, especially the dynamic where the need that’s being fed (most often rage) is also the thing the person needs relief from, so the only way they can get relief is to go back to the thing that’s hurting them.

I would say the Venn diagram nests the opposite way. The causes you mention are kinds of values conflicts, and thus a subset of the general cause I am identifying, not the superset.

And some of those differences are due to their different pathologies. Addiction has a physical component that is different from mere identity attachment; and addiction is different from delusion (once someone admits they have a problem, they are still an addict—the medical and psych problem doesn’t go away with any delusion that may have been rationalizing it). So those analogies aren’t very useful explanatorily. And that’s indeed why official diagnostics manuals do not co-associate them (addiction is a completely different disorder from delusion).